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The Crystal Leather Anniversary

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

It occurs
to me that this column comes out on March 5th, my third wedding
anniversary.

And by
“occurs”, I mean my wife reminded me.

As I wrote
a few years ago, it wasn’t supposed to be our “real” wedding. Our intention was
to get married here in Indiana, then have a bigger celebration in her home
state of Missouri. The first wedding was exactly the kind most guys want: Get
it done and over with:

“Mark,
ya’ll wanna?”

“Well …
ouch! Yep.”

“Emily,
ya’ll wanna?”

“I get his
stuff?”

“Yep.”

“Why not?”

“By the
authority of the World Wide Web Church Of Nigerian Princes, ya’ll is hitched.”

Just like
that. Well, except without the accents, or the hesitation, or the questionable
legality. Okay, really not like that at all.

But things
happened: medical stuff, money stuff, bad timing stuff. Basically, real life.
While we still intend to have that down south celebration, it’s far too late
for that be our “real” anniversary.

March 5th
isn’t so bad, because isn’t March when things start to warm up, the snow melts
away, and we see the first signs of nature’s renewal? Okay, not this year, but
still.

So what do
we do for our anniversary? For early March, my idea included a trip to a place
where you can sit on the beach without seeing chunks of ice, unless it’s the
ice in your drinks.

Then I
checked my bank account. There will be no dunes this anniversary, unless you
count snowdrifts in the back yard.

As I
mentioned in my Valentine’s Day column, I really stink at this kind of thing.
So, for what to get my wife for our third anniversary I consulted a trusted
source: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia
is an internet website in which any Joe and his brother, and his brother’s dog
(with internet access) can put in information, so it has to be always accurate.
Right? So I asked it about wedding anniversaries, and this is the first line:

“A wedding
anniversary is the anniversary of the date a wedding took place.”

Why, thank
you, Captain Obvious.

But what
should I get her as a present? Or should I just skip that and move a couch out
to the garage? Too cold for that. So, it turns out there are two kinds of
anniversary gift lists: the traditional one, and a “modern” list created by
librarians at the Chicago Public Library.

If you need
to know something ask a librarian. If they don’t know the answer, it’s not
worth knowing.

So, the
modern suggested gift is crystal and/or glass. Okay. Crystal! Snowflakes are
crystals; I’ll just get her a bowl of snow. Salt’s a crystal; Pass the salt at
dinner, and done. Or salt the snow! But no way could it be that easy.

I could go
with glass—new windows for the house. I know she wants new windows, but that
also seemed a bit too easy.

So I went
to the internet again and asked what the difference is between crystal and
glass. Turns out the librarians are talking about glass kitchen stuff, like
glasses (which, duh) and bowls, and other breakables. As that last word
implies, glass kitchen stuff doesn’t last long around my house.

So, what’s
crystal? It turns out crystal is just glass, with the addition of at least 24%
of … lead.

I thought
lead was bad. Although I ate lead paint chips as a child, but it never seemed
to have any ill … what were we talking about?

Okay, then what’s the
traditional third anniversary gift? Turns out, according to the unimpeachable
Wikipedia, it’s leather.

One can go
two ways on the subject of leather anniversary presents. The first, which I
call “50 Shades of Leather”, is questionable for a column that aims to bore
people of all ages. Okay, so what about the second? Exactly when did leather
become the ideal anniversary gift? Did women of olden times have a lot of
leather underwear? That would explain why the women in old photos always looked
so dour: They weren’t chaffing only because they couldn’t vote.

Armed with
this, I knew instantly what my wife would like for our third anniversary: Tack.
For those of you who don’t know (I didn’t, until my horse-loving wife told me),
tack is all that stuff that goes on horses while they’re being ridden, like the
reins, and the bridle (which isn’t related to brides at all), and bits, which
are apparently the stuff that the horses bite. Better it than me.

So tack for
my wife, who loves horses, and I actually did some window shopping before I
remembered we had no horse. Just a horse-sized dog.

This whole
time something had been bothering me, something niggling at the back of my
mind. I’d been ignoring that as I searched for leather and crystal, or maybe crystal
leather, which might be a brilliant invention and forget it, it’s mine. Finally
I went back to the column I wrote just after we married, in which I described
the wedding situation. Maybe I’d forgotten some detail.

I read the
thing through twice. It wasn’t one of my best. Finally, something caught my
interest: The date. I posted it on March 14th …

2012.

This isn’t
our third anniversary. It’s our second
anniversary.

So I’m off
to find some China, thanks to the librarians. Or some cotton, thanks to someone
from Medieval days. Or, I don’t know, a cotton plant made of China.